By Cornelia Feye
March 30, 2026
Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio is obsessed with time: blue time, subjective time, linear time, lived time, broken time, time-out, lost time, physical time, sick time, shared time, human time, the social construct of time, and in this exhibition, specifically: crip time.
Crip time defines our relationship with time through the lens of neurodivergent experience. Rather than viewing time as a rigid, linear march (often called “normative” or “industrial” time), crip time acknowledges that bodies and minds operate on different schedules.
The titles of Ortiz-Rubio’s drawings and her mural in the exhibition are a collection of expressions for time in our daily language that are also used during medical conditions, such as Give me time, Let’s give it time, take your time, let’s go at your own pace, go at your time.
They hint at the fact that time is subjective. And that we can manipulate it. We can give time, we can take time, we can change time to go slower for ourselves or for others. That’s crip time.
Ortiz-Rubio sees a close connection between crip time and noncompliance: “Noncompliance for me is a human right. It is the right to say No. Time being non-compliant is crip time. Because it’s not following one straight, linear line,” she explained. Noncompliance can be found in many different contexts, such as being noncompliant with inhumane or illegal rules of society or the state.
Ortiz-Rubio is a visual artist from Mexico whose multidisciplinary practice includes painting, drawing, murals and installations. She has a long-standing relationship with the Bread & Salt and was their IMPACT Artist-in-Residence in 2018. Noncompliant is her first solo exhibition in the main gallery. In an interview with the artist, Ortiz-Rubio told me that she structured the exhibition space in three parts.
The first part provides the title for the show. A chair lays on its side, next to a hand-written piece of paper on the wall repeating the words: noncompliant, lazy, stubborn, difficult, won’t sit still, manipulative and bad. The chair is being noncompliant, because it is not fulfilling its function the way society defines it. Nobody can sit on it.
The installation is based on a specific, autobiographical event. “Noncompliant is used in schools or doctors’ offices. It describes someone saying No. The word feels very negative,” Ortiz-Rubio said.
“If a neurotypical child doesn’t want to get a vaccine because it is scared of needle, the doctor will tell the child not to be scared, we’ll help you through it. But with someone like my daughter, who is non-speaking and may yell or shake her head, many people will say, she is noncompliant and will hold them down or strap them down. But they don’t need to be sedated, they just need to be treated with dignity. When my daughter found the right dentist, she could do all the necessary things because she felt supported appropriately.”
The word noncompliant is rooted in ableism; neurodivergent people don’t seem to have the same right to say no. They must obey and not be a problem for other people.
“In her school my daughter had a situation with a teacher who would not treat her well and forced her to sit in this chair when she was only 7 years old. He called her names, a little girl who can’t speak. He told her she would have to be 20 minutes in her time-out, but she didn’t know what 20 minutes were. So, it became an eternity, a horrible thing to do to a child. This is the chair from the school.”
Ortiz-Rubio took the chair and put it on the side, because she wanted the chair to be non-compliant. “By placing it on its side, I want to question the chairs worth. Because society makes us—neurodivergent people—feel like that every day. Is your child worthy to go to school? Is she worthy of being part of the community? Is she worthy of going to the park? There are only four inclusive parks in this county. Ten years ago, when my daughter was born, there was one. We’re constantly receiving the message that she is not worthy because she is not able-bodied. I want to take back the idea of noncompliance as powerful and her right to say no. I’m proud of her when she is noncompliant, when she can, with the little words she has, say no.”
The second part of the exhibition explores how time is constructed physically in our brains; how time is a human invention, and a social construct. Ortiz-Rubio created an immersive mural covering two walls in the Bread & Salt Salon, entitled A tu tiempo or Making Time. It looks like clouds spreading out from a central point.
“In my mural I’m exploring this moment of intense energy used by each neuron in order to extend their axons and create a connection. This connection creates a memory. We need those neurological connections to learn, to create new pathways in our brains. It’s a physical representation of human time being created inside of us. My mural does feel like an explosion because I was thinking of the amount of energy that is used in that instant. There is movement, I wanted it to feel like there is effort inside the gestures of my drawing, because it is an effort for the cell to extend and connect.”
The explosion of energy in the mural represents a different velocity of time—the physical effort of a brain cell to connect—which contrasts with the rigid ticking of a clock. Ortiz-Rubio used the language of the clouds, which has been her trademark, but in this exhibition, she was using them to express what happens neurologically in our brains, as another way to explore crip time. Knowing her work from other exhibitions at the Athenaeum, the Timken Museum and her wall murals throughout San Diego, I still saw explosively expanding storm clouds. The new meaning only revealed itself through her explanations. Art, as a subjective medium, can be seen through many lenses.
In her graphite and watercolor series, Ortiz-Rubio translates the cold precision of medical MRIs into something fluid and organic. The watercolor bleeds like neurotransmitters across a synapse, while the graphite lines trace the delicate, spindly reach of axons searching for a connection. By using these traditional art materials to interpret neurological imagery, she softens the clinical gaze, turning a scientific record into a poetic map of the mind.
The third part of the exhibition is called the Seizure Journal Series. It consists of 20 horizontal 9×4 inch ink and graphite, watercolor, and dry pigment images. They are lined up along the main wall of the gallery space. Each one is a page of the Seizure Diary Ortiz-Rubio had to keep for her daughter’s doctor.
Ortiz-Rubio’s daughter has epilepsy, as a symptom of a genetic disorder called Angelman Syndrome. She is non-verbal so her mother has to document what she is going through. The neurologist asks people with epilepsy to create a seizure diary. Ortiz-Rubio had to record when the seizures happened, how long they took, all the details, and these pages are her recorded time.
“They are expressions of my experience as a spectator or a witness, because my daughter can’t tell me. I had to research what other people describe. They use terms like breaking time, losing time, forgetting things, disorientation. There is one piece called cotton head, and many people us that phrase, because after having a seizure people feel their head is filled with cotton. They can’t think straight, and it’s confusing and disorienting,” she said.
As a mother and an artist Ortiz-Rubio records time that her daughter loses or breaks, creating a shared temporal record. One particularly striking entry in the Seizure Journal Series presents a spectral view of the human nervous system—a skeletal, abstract figure emerging from a deep, immersive wash of blue. Here, Ortiz-Rubio depicts the body in a state of dysregulation, a visual shorthand for the internal storm of epilepsy. By personifying the nervous system, she moves the narrative away from a cold diagnosis and back toward the human figure. It illustrates that a neurological condition isn’t just a data point on a medical chart, but a lived, bodily experience—one that requires a more gentle and caring pace of time.
Ultimately, Ortiz-Rubio’s work suggests that crip time is the most human time because it accepts that we must all go at our own pace. By reclaiming noncompliance she advocates for a world that prioritizes treating all ways of being with dignity—whether that is a child finding her voice, a chair refusing its function, or the slow, natural rhythms of the environment, from the growth of a tree to the patient formation of minerals—that refuse to be rushed by industrial standards.
We all will experience crip time eventually, either because we grow old or we have an injury, depression or anxiety. All these conditions affect how we live time. It’s not foreign to any human. It relates to all of us.
